Software Giant SAP Getting Giant Boost in NFL

When Michael Lewis wrote "Moneyball" more than a decade ago, it sparked a revolution in baseball. Instead of just a lot of aesthetic judgments about body type and how a swing looked, many in pro baseball began to rely solely on statistical analysis when choosing players to draft.

However, picking players in football has ALWAYS been more stat-focused. Now software giant SAP is hoping to take it to the next level: A complete one-stop shop scouting database

The collegiate players may then repeat many of those tests at what are called "pro days" at their respective colleges and universities.

There are numbers, observations and even video.

SAP said they have the software that can aggregate all this information and sort it faster than anyone on earth—all on one single screen.

"Scouts would come in (to meetings) with binders and pens. The walls were full of white boards and magnets," said Mike Morini, general manager for the cloud at SAP. "Think about scouts going out with an iPad, and it's instantly available to everyone."

Morini means that a scout could be entering information on that iPad, and it could be instantly available to everyone in the organization.

That sounds like something we should be able to do in this technological age, but the added value is that it all can be sorted and searched in a matter of seconds with the ability to incorporate stats, video and other elements.

The San Francisco 49ers are using the software already, even though it's still a work in progress.

"We had a bottleneck in our scouting," admitted the team's Chief Technology Officer, Kunal Malik. "We had problems that we were dealing with.

"SAP and I were talking about partnerships already, and since this was high priority for us, I brought it up."